brain coupling by Uri Hasson

Whilst listening with your whole self have you ever caught yourself mirroring the expressions on the speakers face? It is because when you listen to stories and understand them, you experience the exact same brain pattern as the person telling the story.

Here is why?

Why telling stories builds empathy and also why, when you tell a good one, people act as if they’re watching it unfold before them.

Princeton neuroscientist Uri Hasson explains how fMRI can reveal temporally coupled neural response patterns between storyteller and listener.
They had a woman tell a story while in an MRI scanner. They then had a group of volunteers listen to the stories through headphones while they had their brains scanned.

When the woman spoke English, the volunteers understood her story, and their brains synchronized. When she had activity in her insula, an emotional brain region, the listeners did too. When her frontal cortex lit up, so did theirs. By simply telling a story, the woman could plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into the listeners’ brains.

Most cognitive studies focus on processes that occur within a single individual. Brain-to-brain coupling constrains and shapes the actions of each individual in a social network, leading to complex joint behaviors that could not have emerged in isolation.

It is Brain-to-Brain Coupling where the listener’s brain activity mirrors the speaker’s activity with a delay. It is the signal is generated by another brain and body that resemble one’s own.